Meta began 2023 on a grim note, with Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) slapping the tech giant with fines in excess of $410 million for breaches of articles of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that seeks to give users more control over their data.
With data privacy becoming a growing concern worldwide, the EU has led the charge to rein in Big Tech firms with its 2018 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has since become an international reference. The regulations require companies to ask for consent when they collect personal information and companies can no longer use data collected from several sources to profile users against their will. Violations of said regulations invite fines.
The hefty fine slapped on Meta, however, is not the biggest such penalty imposed on tech giants.
The company to pay the biggest one-time fine for a regulatory breach, as the chart shows, is Amazon. In July 2021, the Jeff Bezos-owned tech giant was slapped with a massive $790 million fine for "non-compliance with general data processing principles".
A distant second is Meta-owned Instagram, which was fined $429 million in 2022 for the same reason as Amazon, according to CMS GDPR Enforcement Tracker.
While Amazon most certainly holds the dubious honour of being slapped with the biggest one-time penalty, Meta seems to be a consistent repeat offender, with the tech giant and its subsidiaries having paid fines in excess of $1.4 billion since 2021.
Search giant Google, also a repeat offender, paid considerably less in fines compared to that of Mark Zuckerberg-owned Meta.